General Information
The basic thrust of the narrative is as a revenge plot and a nearly exact retread of the concept behind the brilliant Banishers, but reduces it to be about pure revenge few of the moral quandies that Banishers throws on players. The adventure itself is semi-open-world but largely linear in the way you'll be moving through it (there isn't an abundance of side quests to distract you). One of the core mechanics of that is that you need to liberate villages and towns from the encroaching hordes of the undead, in a mechanic that is almost totally ripped from Rise of the Ronin. And the action is basically the same as all other Soulslikes, with a heavy emphasis on countering opponents. One neat touch is that your powerful – but limited – gun weapon can actually disrupt an enemy attack in the same way that a parry would, but otherwise the game has the same "B-tier Souls" feel as a Steelrising or Lies of P.
Essentially, for all the big-ticket items, the game has taken such a "best practices" approach to so much of its material and will likely leave some players cold on it. That is unfortunate because in many smaller ways the developers really have tried to do something interesting. One great feature is the fact that you don't automatically earn your experience points after defeating enemies. Instead, the game keeps a tally of them, and you're free to try and knock off some more enemies for a multiplier effect. When you're happy with what you've collected, you can "bank" them, and then they become standard experience points that you can spend on upgrades. The downside is that if you take any damage the entire un-banked pool of experience loot is lost, so you need to make some careful decisions about the risk and reward involved in trying for a big combo.
Another really neat feature is that early on you gain access to a fox-like companion (a "good deity" that is seeking to help humanity resist all the evil deities). This buddy has the ability to pile on curses and otherwise harass the enemies by poisoning them, stunning them, weakening them, and more. In combination with the firearm and axe melee weapon, the fox becomes an incredibly useful part of the elegant combat system, and you can tell the developers spend an inordinate amount of time crafting encounters that would require you to make deft use of all these features.
While the difficulty of enemy encounters might disappoint, running into them won't. Flintlock has an impressively coherent aesthetic and enemy designs make them look much more intimidating than they are to actually fight. The developers have also mastered the Dark Souls trick of giving you a far-off look at something that you know you'll eventually get to explore, and it'll be intriguing enough that you'll want to take the journey to get there. At no stage does it feel like Flintlock is dragging, which is an impressive feat for a genre that is well-known for getting players stuck in ruts in the most annoying locations.